So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

[Charles Curley]

Or: Why I'm jumping ship to Ubuntu.

This is intended as friendly criticism, not as flame bait. Fedora devs
may wish to address these issues.

I started using Linux in 1994, and Red Hat shortly thereafter. About a
year and a half ago I reluctantly started looking at other disties,
and settled on Ubuntu. After experimentation, I started migrating to
Ubuntu, and completed that in December when I decommissioned the last
Fedora box in my home.

I'm migrating to Ubuntu for several reasons, actually.

* Fedora is more bleeding edge than I'm comfortable with. I need a
  stable desktop Linux, and Fedora breaks too often.

* Fewer updates. One might be forgiven the impression that Fedora has
  a new kernel every week. It just seems that way. Meanwhile Ubuntu
  updates are few and far between. This has advantages and
  disadvantages, of course. The most obvious disadvantage being if
  something is broken in Ubuntu it is likely to stay broken, possibly
  until the next distribution. I have lived with that and can do so
  again.

* Related to the last, no simple caching software. The last I knew,
  there was no RPM analog to the Debian apt-cacher. This caches deb
  packages, so that, for all the machines that use it, a given package
  is pulled in from the mirror only once, thereby reducing network
  traffic, and greatly speeding updates on other clients of the
  cache. For Fedora, I used an rsync script, but that meant I had
  copies of entire repos, with massive redundancy of updated packages,
  far more than I need.

* Small machine installations. Using the "alternate installation CD"
  and installing a text only environment, I can run Ubuntu on a
  machine with 68 MB on it, my venerable 133 MHz firewall. Indeed,
  this was the first place I tried Ubuntu in production. I am looking
  at the fit-PC (http://www.fit-pc.com/new/) for a number of
  applications, and it comes from the factory with Ubuntu 7.10. While
  Fedora 8 will run on the fit-PC, I wonder for how long?

* I prefer XFCE or similar lightweight desktops for these machines. I
  can get XFCE with xubuntu. I see no Fedora analog.

* While I am glad to see the Fedora live CDs, they are klunky compared
  to the Ubuntu/Knoppix/Finnix live CDs I have used. For one thing, on
  shutdown those live CDs will eject the CD and wait for you to remove
  them from the drive.

-- 

Charles Curley                  /"\    ASCII Ribbon Campaign
Looking for fine software       \ /    Respect for open standards
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http://www.charlescurley.com    / \    No M$ Word docs in email

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